High-speed trains will whisk passengers between Dublin, Cork and Belfast in 2050 when the population of Ireland reaches eight million, while some four million "smart" cars will be catered for on automated motorways, it was predicted yesterday.
David Waters, former managing director of Iarnród Éireann and joint chairman of a future think-tank at the Irish Academy of Engineering, also forecast that Dublin's eastern bypass motorway would be built on an embankment along Sandymount Strand.
He told a conference organised by the Institute of Geologists of Ireland (IGI) that this would be unavoidable if houses in Sandymount were to be protected from rising sea levels as a result of climate change; ie the motorway would provide their flood defence.
Mr Waters also predicted that an under-sea tunnel would be built between Rosslare and south Wales, and the Shannon estuary would be developed to cater for ever-larger container ships linked by high-speed freight trains to the heart of Europe via the tunnel.
He said new motorways would become more automated with the aid of Galileo, a European satellite navigation system. This would be linked to an in-car traffic information manager (TIM) enabling motorists to travel on "auto-pilot" at a constant speed.
TIM would pay tolls electronically, and give drivers updates on journey time, weather and likely delays.
Cars would be powered by non-polluting hydrogen fuel cells in 2050. The use of petrol and diesel would be banned because oil would be in such short supply. The world economy would have moved away from fossil fuels as part of the drive to combat climate change.
However, Eddie O'Connor, chief executive of Airtricity, said there was still a long way to go.
"As things stand, we will not meet the targets we have agreed for renewable energy" - 13.2 per cent of production by 2010.
He said Ireland would also fail to meet its target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, adding that the urgent need to "decarbonise" electricity production was "going to cost a lot of money".
Extolling the virtues of wind power, Mr O'Connor said it was a natural source of energy that emitted no noxious gasses, was fuel free, needed no supply chain and had the potential to "introduce a totally new dimension into energy policy" in Ireland.
IGI president Gareth Jones said rocks were "at the heart of every big infrastructure development". Understanding sub-surface geology was "critical to the delivery of large projects on time and within budget".
He quoted Tim Brick, Dublin City Council's deputy city engineer in charge of the Port Tunnel, as saying that "all civil engineering is a risk; it is not an exact science. The trick is risk management." Central to this was an understanding of rocks and soil.
Seán Finlay, managing director of TES Consulting Engineers, cited the November 2003 landslide in Derrybrien, Co Galway, as an example of a high-profile project - it involved the development of a wind farm - where geological issues became controversial.
